Police who are accustomed to men threatening women in person with guns and knives have a harder time figuring out what to do about online threats, wrote Hess. Time reporter Catherine Mayer, who got an online bomb threat, was told by police to just stay offline — hardly plausible for a professional whose work requires an online presence.
There’s a moment in “Boyhood,” the new movie by Richard Linklater, when the boy in question, an eighth-grader, asks his mother for permission to attend a party that won’t have adult supervision. Reluctantly, she agrees, saying it’s OK as long as he takes his cellphone.
How Venmo became the ultimate social network for voyeurs and gossips
Facebook was a great tool. Sadly, it no longer is and it will not be anymore.
I want to come back to Facebook as an user. I want to connect with my online friends once again. I want to see what they are up to. But until the day I feel comfortable enough sharing anything on Facebook, I will avoid your site like a plague. Can you please help ex-users like me rebuild the lost confidence of using your social network?
You’ve probably heard about the controversial Facebook study. But manipulating the News Feed is Facebook’s entire business.
The conventional wisdom is that if you’re not paying for anything, then you are the product being sold. But that line of thinking is pretty superficial — it ignores both the value people do get out of Facebook and the actual way Facebook makes money.
On Facebook, advertisers can pay to make sure their targeted stuff shows up in your News Feed. There’s just a few sponsored entries mixed into the usual endless scroll of stuff your friends have shared. Ads are designed to change our emotions and advertisers are paying Facebook to manipulate your emotions by changing the News Feed.
What we’re mad about is the idea of Facebook having so much power we don’t understand — a power that feels completely unchecked when it’s described as “manipulating our emotions.”
The Facebook Data Science group that experimented on user emotions until recently operated with few boundaries and little oversight.
Sometimes, being wrong on the Internet means having to say you’re sorry. Facebook offered up an apology to its users on Sunday, after it came to light that the company had manipulated the news feeds of more than half a million people so it could change the number of positive and negative posts that appear from their friends.
The FBI is getting set to deploy its own system of computerized facial recognition, called NGI. It will bring together millions of photos in a central federal database, reaching all 50 states by the end of the year.
But compared with Facebook’s DeepFace system it isn’t very good. Give Facebook two pictures, and it can tell you with 97 percent accuracy whether they’re the same person, roughly the same accuracy as a human being in the same spot. To be fair, Facebook has a whole network’s worth of data on its side.
The nation’s most powerful law enforcement agency is getting outgunned by a social network.
“Digital gerrymandering” represents a frightening future. Here’s how to prevent it.
On November 2, 2010, Facebook’s American users were subject to an ambitious experiment in civic-engineering: Could a social network get otherwise-indolent people to cast a ballot in that day’s congressional midterm elections?
The answer was yes.
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